1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mobile communication terminal, and more particularly to an apparatus and a method for reducing power consumption in a mobile communication terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, a mobile communication terminal sets a sleep mode in order to save power in a waiting state. Further, a mobile communication terminal is activated again when a paging period and an operating system timer expire. The operating system timer denotes various timers provided for operation of a mobile communication terminal. For example, the operating system timer may include a protocol timer, a Man Machine Interface (MMI) timer, an application timer, etc. That is, when a mobile communication terminal is set to receive a paging channel transmitted from a network, the mobile communication terminal must end the sleep mode at a reception point of the paging channel. Further, the mobile communication terminal must end the sleep mode when the various timers of the mobile communication terminal expire. This is also applied when an end point of the sleep mode and a waking point by expiration of the operating system timer are within several tens of ms for reception of the paging channel. In other words, the mobile communication terminal is activated when the timer expires even within several tens of ms. Therefore, power consumption occurs during activation of the mobile communication terminal in each case.
The reception of the paging channel is an operation which must necessarily be performed by the mobile communication terminal at the corresponding point in order to receive system information, but an error of about several tens of ms can occur depending on the type of the system operating timer. However, most timers do not cause fatal defects in the operation of the mobile communication terminal. For example, even though time information displayed on a display screen of the mobile communication terminal has an error of about several tens of ms, a user cannot notice the difference. Accordingly, if a difference of several tens of ms is properly corrected, it is possible to reduce the frequency of terminating a sleep mode and thus reduce power consumption.